XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, is a markup language that encodes documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. It's widely used in cloud computing for data interchange, configuration files, and in web services.

• XML provides a standardized way to exchange data between applications and across networks.
• It's self-descriptive, meaning the tags in the document define the data and the data types.

XML works by using tags to define elements and structure in a document. These elements can then be parsed and manipulated by an XML processor.

• XML documents are made up of storage units called entities, which contain either parsed or unparsed data.
• XML is platform-independent, meaning it can be used across different systems and technologies.

A cloud service provider, CloudServe, uses XML to exchange data between their cloud services and their customers' applications. The data is encoded in XML format, which can be easily parsed and processed by the applications, regardless of the platform or programming language they're using.